Unity XR: How to Build AR and VR Apps

"The virtual reality and augmented reality industries are growing by leaps and bounds — but finding workers with the right skills can be a challenge." - CNBC report

Virtual and Augmented Reality are poised to revolutionize how we interact with computers, with the world and with each other, and Unity is at the forefront of this technology; an estimated 90% of Samsung Gear VR games and 53% of Oculus Rift (games at launch) were Made With Unity. And according to labor market analytics company Burning Glass, "there’s nothing virtual about the jobs in this field. They’re here and now and very real."

In this course, you'll learn how to design, develop, troubleshoot, and publish your own mobile VR applications in Unity for Google Daydream, Gear VR, or Oculus Go devices. Using the very latest techniques recommended by Unity's VR engineers, you'll build a complete VR environment that you can continue to use after the course, while learning to apply best practices in user experience, interaction, teleportation and navigation design for VR. In short, this course will take you from software developer to VR developer.

This is the second of three courses in Unity's XR Specialization, which includes an Introduction to XR course as well as a planned course focused on developing handheld Augmented Reality (AR) applications with Unity.

The course assumes that you already have experience developing applications with Unity and that you are comfortable with basic C# programming. It will also be helpful if you are familiar with building other types of apps to run on mobile devices.

What is XR? It’s shorthand for a related set of new technologies that are changing the way we interact with the world and with each other: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality.

To understand XR, you need to understand the technologies that enable it. If you understand the available technologies, how they are used, and what their future holds, you’ll be well equipped to deal with XR as it rapidly evolves and converges.

In this course, we will present an introduction to XR using a broadly chronological approach, focusing on how all of the underlying technologies came together at key moments in the history of XR to launch the concepts of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality into the mainstream consciousness. Throughout the course, we’ll give a brief description of each of the supporting technologies, some history about when it first came into use, limitations and future potential for improvement, and how it’s used for AR, VR, and MR.

As you learn about the technology, you’ll also develop hands on experience in the field along two tracks. First, you will use Unity to build and run two simple XR applications on your own smartphone: a “VR Museum” app and a handheld Augmented Reality app. Second, you will brainstorm, define, visualize, and iterate your own original concept for an XR application, ending the course with a thorough and peer-reviewed XR Product Brief that you could use as the basis for future development.

This is the first of three planned courses in Unity's XR Specialization, which include the Mobile VR App Development with Unity course as well as a future course focused on developing Augmented Reality (AR) applications with Unity.